But let me tell you a little story:
I´ve almost completely covered the first conference on video, but the challenge that I faced back home, when sifting though the tapes with approximately 15 hours of material, was simply devastating.
I´ve tried to cut down a single presentation to a couple of minutes so it would have made sense to publish a collection of some of such excerpts but it was simply impossible due to the interest of ANY spoken word and ANY shown slide or other material.
This experience showed that the Blender Conference is different to other conferences I´ve already attended. On "the other conferences" each speaker disposed at least 3/4 of the given time for the presentation of his vita and the company he´s working for.
So my conclusion was, that any effort to make a full coverage of the conference (3 days, 8 hours each on 3 tracks... this makes 72 hours!!!) would occupy a production unit for months.
It´s a completely different job composing some footage for a news-broadcast than distilling the essence out of the whole conference.
I may be wrong, but this was my experience with conference #1.
So please be careful blaming anybody for not making a proper documentation! It´s associated with such tremendous strain!

bertram wrote:So please be careful blaming anybody for not making a proper documentation! It´s associated with such tremendous strain!

That is why I wrote "a bit"! But seeing how good the Blender Manual has become by the work of volunteers, I have hope that something similar can be done for the conference.

If this doesn't happen, then maybe rather have slides and texts as supplied by the speakers but leave out the video (the videos that are online are of little use and as such probably eat more money in terms of traffic used than they provide benefit...

k-fish wrote:But seeing how good the Blender Manual has become by the work of volunteers, I have hope that something similar can be done for the conference.

I think thats misleading things a bit. The Blender Manual was not made by volunteers.

Well, most of the content was, no? Maybe I am not up to date on this, but I think most people on the doc board are doing this in their free time. Of course the actual typesetting of the book (and the related editorial work) were done by professionals. But the actual content has evolved much compared to the last printed manual - which was the starting point.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

But anyway, a group of a few people editing and putting together material provided by the speakers plus some video/audio recordings could achieve a lot, given the input isn't below all expectations. I still believe in that.

joeri wrote:

k-fish wrote:for a few bucks.

that will cover the postage stamps

And the envelopes, hopefully

I mean, honestly, I'd pay 10 bucks for a CD with some good content and coverage of most of the confenrence.

I don't know enough about the book to give a correct answer.
The content I deliverd was partly paid and partly contributed.

>But anyway, a group of a few people editing and putting together material provided by the speakers plus some video/audio recordings could achieve a lot, given the input isn't below all expectations. I still believe in that.

I think it's important to document the event well, whatever the outcome of that material.
Special care should be put into the audio. Audio is always a problem.
Nice audio productions are made in audio booths and sound studio's, not conference halls and small reading rooms.

but as bertram says; it's no use ending up with 72 hours of material that can't be edited.

If the speakers have material that is easy converted into slides for other media then it could prove an easy task.
But most of the time it's not. Some have some pp slides, others have some files on their disk and internet links, others scribble on a board.

Lot of that stuff don't 'stick' on video. And can take days of (unthankfull) work to be made into something presentable.

Maybe it turns out to be very improved this year.
And if all the audio is recorded in an understandable way, it might even be possible to make something downloadable. Maybe in packages or something...
"Session Sat3 : mp3 32Mb and 16 slides."
"Session Sat4 : mp3 16Mb and 36 slides."

a lot of blender users aren't english speaking people. in general, reading or writing a 'basic' english is all they can afford.
so listening english audio are far too hard and useless. personnally, i can catch up only half or third of the different videoTut.

the topmost would be a paper like the one by pixar at siggraph.
but a summary of the conference with some video abstracts or stills will be fair.

joeri wrote:If the speakers have material that is easy converted into slides for other media then it could prove an easy task.But most of the time it's not. Some have some pp slides, others have some files on their disk and internet links, others scribble on a board.

What about asking them to provide something more or less uniform for producing a CD or something downloadable? It doesn't have to be a requirement, but I think asking nicely might suffice, no?